5th Week

No longer must teachers and students be limited by classroom walls or geographical distances that separate them from a world of knowledge and experiences.

Well, this week readings didn't bring anything really new to me... PBL is something I'm used to and I had already had contact with WebQuests before in my life. I am also used to creating rubrics. However, it was good to add some website links to my Delicious page! It was nice to learn how to create a rubric online! It was great to, finally, outline a WebQuest that I will soon give life to!
As I mentioned on my post at Nicenet, I enjoyed reading Susan Gaer’s article as it meets my own ideas and much of what Portuguese teachers of English are asked to do! PBL is not new for me I truly believe it can affect student motivation as students feel they are part of the process themselves. Ss get involved in task completion and they usually want to be sure they made a contribution as the project often relates to their personal experiences. Of course, it is not always like this with every student, some of them still don’t engage on it because they just don’t want to do anything… Nevertheless, most Ss enjoy doing projects and these projects help them get aware of the need to learn English at the same time they make Ss responsible for their own process of learning. PBL can enhance a lot of different skills, such as reading, writing, speaking, listening, computer skills, …
Concerning their behavior, I would say PBL is good in the sense that Ss become more participative and collaborative. As they usually work together they learn to respect each others’ opinions and to share, which is very positive.
Now, though I use PBL often, I've never tried doing it with technology...About 16 years ago, when I started teaching, the question was still whether it was worth using computers with our students. Most teachers still didn’t even have a computer of their own and schools themselves were hardly equipped with computers… No wonder many people advocated that it was a mere fad and as such would one day, sooner than later, slide into oblivion and no more would be spoken of it. They turned to be wrong, after all… And today technology is all pervasive and at the centre of much of what is exciting and new in education! Thus, it makes all sense that we should think about PBL with technology. PBL with technology frees the lesson from the classroom and helps to build up autonomous, independent students as they have to work on their own. Students are more likely to be actively engaged in such learning activities if they realize there is a tangible outcome. They will probably learn more and the teacher can teach less. The teacher can become a guide, a facilitator. Lessons become less teacher-centred and thus the relationship teacher/student can also improve.
Now, about WebQuests… According to Bernie Dodge, “an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing.” This definition implies activities with an essentially exploratory aspect against activities where Ss only get information, which proves that its author is one of those who advocate an active learning, one of those who believes that one should learn by doing and in the specific case of foreign languages, one learns them by using (speaking/writing) them. On the other hand, it suggests that the internet is a researchable repository of information with which the Ss must interact, and only if it does not give us reliable information should we use videoconferencing.
As most schools have a limited number of computers and most often they are not enough for all the Ss we have in a class, asking a student to do some research without guiding him/her on that task may mean, especially if the student is supposed to do it at school, that he/she will need the computer for many hours, thus providing others from using it. This is one of the reasons why WebQuests are good – they help Ss spare time, since the websites they are supposed to look at have been previously selected by the teacher who has designed the project. Besides that, as they have been previously selected by the teacher they are bound to have reliable information that is also suitable for the Ss age, maturity and level of language knowledge.
Something that I also think is relevant concerning WebQuests is the fact that Ss may be assigned roles or points of view, which can make it more interesting as they usually enjoy performing!
In my opinion, WebQuests are a world to explore and they constitute a stimulating alternative to many dull activities that we sometimes, either because we lack imagination or time, ask our Ss to do.
I started creating my first WebQuest today and I had lots of fun doing it, so I suppose my students will also feel the same when they are asked to put it into practice!
Have a great week!
Yours,
Elsa

4th Week

People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can let them be. I don't try to control a sunset.I watch it with awe as it unfolds, and I like myself best when appreciating the unfolding of a life. Carl R. Rogers

It's a simple fact: if you don't get to know your students, you can't reach them; if you can't reach them, you can't teach them. I think this is something important to bear in mind when we are planning a lesson, as the success of that planning depends a lot on how well you know the audience. That's why I chose my 9th form class for the Project: they've been my students for the last two years and I feel I know them well enough to know what works with them and what doesn't.
I had a lot of fun planning my lesson as I really enjoy the topic I chose and the Meatrix movies. Nevertheless, it was not easy... First, because I haven't taught since the 9th June and now I'm rusty :). Second, because I find it difficult to come up with a lesson out of the blue, I mean,without following a pre-established plan, a sequence, and Third, because my Internet connection didn't work for the whole week, I worked from 9am to 7pm at school and I couldn't do anything but the task I was assigned there and I had to wait until today that I'm at my brother's to be able to do what I was supposed to on Nicenet and here!
Now, what did I like the most about this week's tasks? Besides the lesson plan, I really enjoyed reading the articles on writing and reading: great ideas I took from them! I've printed both and they are already full of notes. On the one hand I'm eager to put most ideas into practice, but on the other hand I'm afraid of the bunch of texts I'll have to mark afterwards...
The websites Deborah suggested we looked at also proved to be interesting and I managed to find a few pages I can use with my students, though the topics addressed do not always meet my needs.
All in all, I must say that once again I feel there is a lot of knowledge still waiting for me to get it and I'm glad I was chosen to attend this course!
Have a wonderful week!
Elsa

3rd Week

Once upon the time, a couple of years ago, a powerful information wizard was born. His name is Internet. Gradually he has become very powerful swallowing enormous amounts of information and providing people with them. People - who always tend to be curious - were thinking about which useful service could the wizard do for the mankind. Some languages teachers said:"We can use his web-pages as learning materials." Lenka Bucherová

And here we are, proving those first 'thinkers' were right!
These week's tasks were, once again, challenging and profiting! I feel I gained a lot from what I've done this week, but I'm also sure I gained a lot from what all my coursemates have done!
I started by doing the task related to 'Delicious.com', just because I'm a sweet tooth and its name sounded appealing to me... :)It was a sweet discovery indeed and what's best: it doesn't make me put on weight! The only thing that gets fatter thanks to it is my resources pile and my knowledge on useful and practical web sites. Isn't it wonderful to be able to access your 'secret weapons' from any computer?! And sharing them with others? And having access to others'? JUST GREAT!
Reading the materials on Listening/Speaking Skills was good as well. As an EFL teacher I always try to make sure my students can understand what they listen to and that they can speak, because I believe that is the most important thing to do with a language: communicate by speaking and listening! I don't always succeed in doing it, but most of the times my students can do well. Still, I always try to find new exercises that can help them with that, and both the documents we read and the sites I looked for as well as the ones suggested by everyone in this course gave me some pretty nice and new ideas on how to do it!
As I said in one of the comments I posted on Nicenet, Speaking Skills are important for students' evaluation in Portugal. What I didn't say is that it is one of the things that scaries me most! It's very difficult for me to know how to accurately evaluate them... I take notes on their mistakes, pronunciation, ideas and so on, but I'm always afraid I might be too demanding or too soft when it comes to decide on their final score... Any suggestions on how I can cope with this?
Have a nice weekend!

2nd Week

The single most important contribution education can make to a child's development is to help him toward a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. D. Goleman

I guess we can say the same about the teacher's education, because there is always something new we can learn and that can suit us better and thus make us more satisfied and more competent. At least, that's how I felt when I 'found out' the search engines that Deborah suggested! I must confess the pedagogical work I have been doing with my students has not contemplated in a systematic and sustained way the use of the Internet, because I'm not really sure of how to use it either in the classroom or even at home as a source of information. Most of the times I google for texts or additional information on some topic, but I always find it difficult to get what I really wanted. Now, I just hat to take a look at http://www.archive.org and I immediately found many interesting and suitable movies for my lessons. It's a fact they are not as recent as I'd like them to be, but they can be useful for comparing and teaching a bit about culture and the past. There are lots of commercials I can use when I talk about consumerism and advertising, for instance. My students can compare how commercials used to be and how they are nowadays...
I've always considered that videos are one of the best tools for the English lesson: students like them and they are authentic. So, I was thrilled to find the Yahoo video search. I had been trying to find Rin Tin Tin episodes for ages and now, all of a sudden, there they are!
Now, when I clicked on 'social issues' and I found out most of the topics are part of the English syllabus in Portugal, I really got excited!It can be so USEFUL!
Now, concerning the ABCD style of defining learning objectives, I do find it accurate and helpful, but isn't it time consuming?
I had 7 classes last year, three different levels of English. I was member of the newspaper team of my school and I coordinated a Comenius project. I must confess I didn't have much time... It usually takes me a long time preparing a lesson and I don't usually write down objectives like these, I do it in a simpler way... I wonder how long it will take me if I always use Bloom's taxonomy...
Well, all in all, I'm just sorry I couldn't work on the tasks earlier this week, because, once again, I really enjoyed it!
Wish you all a pleasant week!